Photo from http://ghth.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/blog-7-autumn-rains-and-harvest-time/

Iman

Seven thousand years of known history and seven billion people on earth - that’s a fact.

How many more facts I need to know the simple answers of my being?Digging into, digging onward, digging at; not to stop digging is a fact.***

I am from a land that gets very dry in the summer and scarcely wet in the winterfrom an olive branch that taught me to pick and prickfrom a neighborhood that smells donkey shit and fed me childhoodI am the daughter of a strong female lineage that sowed love and resistancebreast-fed milky-way dairy and backed faces of martyrs to feed my peopleI am the happiness of a child finding a shekel on the ground and a rage of an old man not able to cross the road to his village because the road was hijacked by a settlerI am the carrier of a Canaanite bone and beauty and the daughter of the goddess of sacred marriageI am the autumn leaf that keeps dying and resurrects in all your religions***

Mary is a name that I always fancied. It was the name of my childhood friend, a name that I wanted to have, but how can I have a Mary name when my mother is called Marie, the French equivalent of the English Mary.

The same name in Arabic is Mariam, a name that people think comes from the Virgin Mary, but it is the name of the northern part of Palestine during the Canaanite era.

A name that grabs the strength of red soil, green land and the music of the waves of the Mediterranean Sea: Miriam, Mary, Marie.Marie had another name - when she was young, she was called Alice. Every time, my great grandmother gave birth to a daughter she would call her Marie, and the child would die.

She lost three Maries and insisted on calling my mother by the same name, a sadomasochist act that I never understood.

Alice/Mary carried the burden of her dead aunts and kept a promise to her grandmother to fight death despite the many visits he attempted at her.Mary though was never married. she is still the neighbor of the virgin Mary.